What makes the newspaper something to fear is not (or, at least, is not only) the economic and political power that runs it. The newspaper was already defined as a medium for conditioning public opinion when the first gazettes came into being. When someone every day has to write as much news as his space allows, and it has to appear readable to an audience of diverse tastes, social class, education, throughout a country, the writer's freedom is already finished: The contents of the message will not depend on the author but on the technical and sociological characterisitcs of the medium.
—Umberto Eco, Italian semiotician, essayist, and novelist, "Reports from the Global Village", 1967